Saturday, June 27, 2009

Continuing our story from Sweden

It’s been almost two weeks since I’ve posted. Sorry about that. A lot has been going on. Below is an update in reverse chronological order.

Kivik, Sweden

For most of the past week we’ve been guests of our friends David and Gunilla McCune in a village (Södra Mellby) near Kivik, Sweden. (See our Web site for a little more about David and Gunilla.) They have a wonderful old house called the Love Nest that they offer friends as a guesthouse. David and Gunilla have been great hosts, and we’ve been lucky to see so much of southern Sweden that most people would miss or not even know existed.

The Love Nest

Yesterday we visited the studio of a local artist, Bo Hultén, who lives on an estate that includes an arboretum with 3,000 trees from all over the world. The trees were collected and planted by an Englishman in the early 1900s, and the property is now under the stewardship of Bo and one of the Swedish universities. It’s open to the public, but Bo gave us a tour. He has the only redwood in Sweden, and it looked quite healthy.

The original plan was to move Solstice from the harbor at Simrishamn, about 20 minutes from here by car, to Kivik harbor. However, significant northeasterly winds developed and Kivik is exposed from that direction. So in addition to being our tour guide and translator, David was also our chauffeur back and forth to the boat as we took care of repairs and checked the fenders and such. We really can’t thank him enough for all he’s done to help us.

Windmill near Gunilla's farm

Hornbæk, Denmark

From Hundige we took the train to Helsingør where Tom and Tutten Mittler (the parents of friends in Berkeley) met us and drove us to their summer place in Hornbæk. Along the way they showed us the castle at Helsingør that is known as Hamlet’s castle, the harbor in Hornbæk, and the beach. Then they treated us to a great Danish lunch at their place.

Tutten & Tom and the lunch feast

Tom and Tutten had kindly delivered a boat part for us from the States. We really appreciate the favor and their tremendous hospitality on one of the few summer days we had had in the Baltic to that point.

Hundige Havn

We chose this harbor near the town of Greve because from the aerial photos it looked like it had side-ties and it was a nice day-sail from Rødvig. It was also less expensive than other Danish marinas at only 90 kroners a night, and the write-up in the Danish sailing magazine said they had free loaner bikes.

Sailing from Rødvig to Hundige Havn started out great and ended pretty good, but in between we had a squall with winds at 30 knots or more. We had already decided to reef, but when we were jibing out of being hove to, the bail that the preventers and boom vang attach to broke. (Sorry, this is only meaningful to sailors.) Now we have to figure out how to get that fixed too. (David and Gunilla helped us take care of this in Kivik.)

When we arrived at Hundige we discovered a new floating dock that didn’t show on the aerial photo, harbor sketch, Google Earth, or our charts. It had slips with green signs (meaning they’re available), so we took one and set off to find the harbormaster. We found the office, but they close at 3 p.m. on Fridays, and it was already four o’clock. They have a nice self-serve check-in machine, though, that takes credit cards and provides a card for the electrical service. The card supposedly also opens the restrooms, but we never found them locked. The showers were nice—and free—and although we thought we had to pay for the electricity, it turned out that we didn’t. The card was needed to get it started, but the machine refunded our electricity money when we turned it in.

Since we left Hundige on Monday, we never did see the harbormaster. The office is closed on the weekends and Mondays. So we didn’t get to borrow bikes, which would have been nice because it’s a hike to the store. In fact, we spoke to only one person at the marina the whole long weekend, and that was a guy who was working on his boat in a slip near us.

For those who may follow behind us, there’s a Lidl up the road at Ishoj and a small market a little closer the other way on the road. A local bus runs along the main beach road from Køge to Friden. I’m not sure how you buy tickets for it. We walked to the train station at Hundige and bought a 24-hour all-zone pass for our trip to Hornbæk, so that took care of the bus too.

Rødvig

From Klintholm we sailed past the cliffs of Møn to Rødvig, which is on the same island as Copenhagen and Hornbæk. The island is called Sjælland, which sounds something like “zaylant.” Danish is impossible to pronounce by sounding out the words, or if it isn’t impossible, I haven’t found the key to help me do it.

Tower at Rødvig

Rødvig was good. It’s a cute fishing village, and it was cheaper than Klintholm and had Internet. Plus, we met some nice Dutch people (Sipke and Margriet) from Friesland and enjoyed visiting with them.

Sipke stopped by our boat to ask about the Internet (since we’re Americans, we would know). When I asked the next day if they connected OK, we visited some more and I discovered that he belongs to Rotary and also that he was at the U of O in 1967-69 at the Business School. (It’s a small world, but it’s a bit uncanny how connections with Oregon keep appearing.)

While in Rødvig, we also took the train to Store Heddinge to get a new CF card for John’s camera. That was a little adventure, and now we have photos again.